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<Paper uid="E99-1052">
  <Title>Determination of Syntactic Functions in Estonian Constraint Grammar</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="291" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Syntactic Analysis of Estonian
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The Estonian language is a Finno-Ugric language and has got a rich structure of declensional and conjugational forms. The order of sentence constituents in Estonian is relatively free and influenced more by semantic and pragmatic factors.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> For morphological analysis of Estonian, we use the morphological analyser ESTMORF (Kaalep, 1997) that assigns adequate morphological descriptions to about 98% of tokens in a text. Morphologically analysed text is disambiguated by Constraint Grammar disambiguator of Estonian.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The development of disambiguator is in process but 85-90% of words become morphologically un-ambiguous and the error rate of this disambiguatot is less than 2% (Puolakainen, 1998).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> All the syntactic information is given by syntactic tags in constraint grammar framework. The syntactic tags of Estonian Constraint Grammar (ESTCG) are derived from tag set of English Constraint Grammar (ENGCG) (Voutilainen et al., 1992) with some modifications considering the specialities of Estonian. These tags are attached to words by 175 morphosyntactic mapping rules.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> After this step of parsing there are approximately 3.8 tags per word.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> After the mapping operation syntactic constraints are applied. ESTCG contains 800 syntactic constraints. In fact, nearly half of them treat  the attributes. It can be explained by the fact that there are 12 types of attributes in ESTCG and the attribute tags are also added to almost every word in sentence (except finite verbs and conjunctions).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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